Why I quit go and started chess

Most people in the western world have never heard of go, or
if they have, they only found it later in life after first playing chess. I’ve
played go steadily for about 5 years and got into it before I ever played chess
online even once. Recently though, I have shifted almost exclusively to chess.

The two games are similar in that they are both abstract strategy board games with no hidden information and no random elements. However, the games differ greatly in philosophy and play. In the past I always marveled at how amazing go is, and lamented chess’s dominance in the western world. I thought, if people would just try go, they would immediately see its superiority and leave chess behind.

And there are many ways in which go is better than chess—the
rules of go are so beautifully simple they seem almost axiomatic while the
rules of chess seem overly complicated and arbitrary, go is about building
while chess is about destroying, go’s strategy is so unbelievably deep that it
makes chess seem like a barroom brawl—but these reasons, while appealing to me
personally, are mostly abstract or aesthetical reasons.

In the areas of practicality and usability, I’ve come to
find chess to be a much better game. Especially in our modern, fast paced world
where people have little time for focus, and are constantly distracted, it
seems that chess’s dominance over go has no end in sight.

Here are some reasons why I personally left go behind and
switched to chess.

I don’t live in Asia

Though go has existed basically unchanged for at least two millennia, it is still almost exclusively played in Korea, Japan and China. Finding someone to play in-person is exceedingly difficult for most westerners.

While this reason does not say anything about the games themselves, it means
a lot of western people won’t care to learn go. If no one you know plays it, or
even knows what it is, why put in the massive amounts of effort required to
become good at it? This absence of real-world opponents is one reason I’ve been
playing go a lot less, and chess a lot more. Playing against someone over a
real board in-person is way more fun that with shadowy characters online. Even
playing an online friend who you know and chat with is difficult for me in the go
world.

On top of that, most videos about go are in languages I don’t understand,
and most teachers of go are in other time zones. News coverage of the major
tournaments is slim, or in other languages. It’s very hard to get involved in
the community.

There is something a bit isolating about the people around you having no
idea what your hobby even is. No one can be impressed with your progress or
your wins. People just narrow their eyes quizzically, or shake their head at
the board and ask ‘is this Othello?’

While this may seem petty, it is so much more psychologically validating when
the people around you actually know what the heck that game is that you’re so
interested in.

The learning curve, and the disparity of skill among players

The first 60 moves of a go game

Though the rules of go can be learned in a couple minutes, the strategy and
even the objective of the game are very difficult to grasp. Beginners are left
with a blank board staring them in the face and no idea where to even start.
This makes it difficult to get new people interested in the game.

Chess, by contrast, has somewhat difficult rules to learn. All the pieces move
differently, there are odd quirks such as castling and en passant. But despite confusing rules, everyone can instantly understand
the goal of the game: kill the king. When learning go, it might be weeks before
a new player understands the beginnings of any kind of strategy. But chess puts
the objective in your mind instantly, and new players feel eager to try out
some plans of attack.

Go’s steep learning curve makes it nearly impossible to find new players.
Say I meet someone who wants to learn go. I teach them the rules and the
objective, and we spend a couple hours together and they get a handle on the game
and are still interested (a miracle!) At this point, any game we play together
is hardly going to be a game at all for me, an experienced player. It might
take months of play and practice for a new player to reach a level where I
could play a fun game with them, even using the maximum handicap. And all this
is assuming the new player doesn’t give up on the game after a week or a month
or a year.

This is not to say I’m a highly skilled player. I am not even that good at
go, relatively. However, the strategy of go is so deep that someone who’s been learning
for a couple months will completely dominate someone who’s been learning a
couple weeks, and someone else who’s been learning for a year will completely
dominate him. With such a wide range of skill just at the beginner level, any player
I meet is likely going to be either way better than me, or much less skilled
than me, and thus not much fun to play.

With chess, on the other hand, so many people in the west already know the
rules that I could play a game with nearly anyone. If I’m way better than them,
I can take away my rook or queen, or put severely less time on my clock and at
least have a laugh or two at my horrible blunders under time pressure.

Game length

You may wonder, as you read the previous section, why I couldn’t put less
time on my clock in a go game, too. I could do this, but go games take so many moves
to complete that giving myself less time per move will hardly affect anything.
Even if I played every move instantly (and I would, when playing with a
beginner) my opponent, being a new player, is going to take their own time to
consider each move. Even if they spend only 30 seconds on each move, this can make
a game last for over an hour.

This is the major reason I don’t play much go. Even against someone of my
own rank, games take forever. Consider: the average amateur chess game takes
somewhere around 25 moves (in chess terms, a ‘move’ is when each player has
moved, so this is 50 total moves) the average go game takes over 250. This
means that even if both players took only ten seconds to play each move, the
game would last for 40 minutes. That’s 40 minutes of intense focus with no interruptions.

By contrast, one can easily complete a game of chess in under ten minutes. I
can play a blitz game on my phone during a 15-minute break at work, easy—sometimes
two games. If I’m playing in-person with a beginner and using longer time
settings, the game will still probably take less than half an hour, and that’s with
plenty of time to think about moves when needed (and time to get up and chat
with other friends, get a snack, etc.)

For those of us who like to play correspondence games, chess is also much
faster in this area. Correspondence games have a very long time-limit to play a
move, usually at least one day. With 24 hours to make your move, you can just
check in throughout the day (or wait for notifications on your phone) and not worry
about a timer counting down. If you’re like me and don’t have an easy way to
carve out an hour or more of guaranteed uninterrupted time, correspondence is the
only way to play go online.

However, with so many moves a single game of correspondence go can easily
take over a month to complete. Some games can last several months, or even a
year depending on the time controls. Playing 20 correspondence go games at once
(which I did regularly for years) gives you only 20 games or less per month. By
contrast, correspondence chess games usually take under a week to complete. I’ve
finished many games in one or two days when my opponent happens to be around at
the same times as me.

All this adds up to the fact that after over five years of playing go I’ve
only played around 1000 games total. This is counting in-person games, and
games across all servers to my best estimation.

By contrast, when I started playing correspondence chess it took less than
two months to earn my 100 games achievement. I could easily play 1000 blitz games
in one year by spending only 30 minutes a day on it.

The importance of being able to complete more games may not stand out at
first, but the satisfaction of the win is a big part of playing any game. And
being able to complete so few games makes each loss more devastating. When I
lose a chess game, I can just shrug it off and look for my mistake and learn
from it, knowing that I can play another game instantly and do better. Losing a
go game after you spent over a month (or 40 minutes of intense focus) planning each
move and strategy, only to throw it all away with one stupid blunder, is a
horrible feeling. It can lead to people getting very upset over losses, and
even cause new players to hesitate to play at all.

Trolls and poor losers

Due to the way a go game is scored, it is quite easy for someone
with bad intentions to ruin the game for their opponent. This generally only
happens online (as with most assholery) but as I mentioned above, online games
are pretty much the only way to play go for westerners. While more experienced
players rarely resort to this kind of behavior, it takes a long time to become
an experienced go player, and that’s a lot of time putting up with trolls.

In chess, if I make ridiculous moves or take forever to make
a move, you’re going to checkmate me or I’ll run out of time and lose. In go,
the winner is decided not by a concrete action, like killing one specific piece
as in chess, but by who has the highest score. The end of a go game is not
reached at any set point on the board, but is agreed upon by both players
together, when both have decided they don’t want to play any more moves. This
may seem counter intuitive, but in go, each game eventually reaches a point
where any move I play will lower my score. Part of the skill of go is
recognizing this time, and then passing your turn. When both players have
passed, the game is over, and the score is counted.

However, there is no rule preventing someone from continuing
to play pointless moves. Someone who knows they are way behind and is bitter
about it can continue playing and thus force the winning player to stick around
to avoid losing by default. There are so many available moves on the go board
that any jerk can drag out a game for a surprisingly long time. This is
exacerbated by the way time settings work in a go game.

In chess, most games are played with a fixed amount of time on the clock, meaning that eventually time will run out. Most go games have a fixed main time also, but when this time runs out the game does not end. Instead it switches to a flat 30 seconds per move. This means that as long as you make sure to always move within 30 seconds, you will never run out of time. A diligent troll can drag on a game almost indefinitely by continuing to play pointless moves, waiting nearly to the end of the 30 seconds for each move. The only way to get out of such a scenario is to just leave the game and let the troll get away with an undeserved win by default, or call a moderator to adjourn the game, which also takes time in most cases.

While trolls like this are relatively rare, it illustrates a
fundamental problem with the game of go: a game cannot be ended without both
players’ cooperation. This issue also crops up when playing with newer players.
A new player is not always able to tell when a game is hopelessly lost, and
will continue playing on and on, which is terribly boring for the stronger
player who is just waiting for the game to be over so they can start a new one.
By contrast, in chess the worse you’re losing the quicker the game is over.

The end

In the end, games are about the people you play them with. Go
presents very little opportunity to play other people and demands a lot of work
to convince anyone to try it. I love so many things about go, but trying to
explain those things to someone who’s never played it is nearly impossible.

It’s still hard to get anyone to play me at chess, but at least I don’t have the insurmountable task of explaining the rules and objective and then slogging through an hour-long game for their first experience. Culture has already fought half the battle for me by introducing most people to the game in childhood.

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Jonas David is a writer and editor at Lucent Dreaming magazine, and lives in the Seattle area. His stories have appeared in Fireside Fiction, Daily Science Fiction, IGMS and others. Additional writing and info can be found at jonas-david.com, and you can follow him on Twitter @thejonasdavid.